Startup Systems

Pick a customer instead of an idea: “One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was that when you're starting a company, you often think you're picking an idea, but you're really picking a customer. It's actually pretty easy to change your idea, but it’s way harder to change the customer you're serving,” says Agrawal.

Eight marketing maxims

• Trust is worth more than attention.


• Helping people get to where they seek to go is more effective than hustling people to persuade them to go where you’re going.


• Choose your customers, choose your future.


• Tell ten people. If they don’t tell the others, make a better product.


• Creating the conditions for the word to spread is the

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Because big businesses aren’t built on gimmicks. You can blitz your way through Sand Hill Road and spike up the App Store charts on gimmicks, but you can’t actually use them to replace Gmail, or Salesforce, or Instagram, or Instagram, or Instagram, or Instagram. Even seemingly instant successes can’t become lasting companies without putting in the... See more

Think about how different an accounting software for tattoo shops would look compared to Quickbooks.

Or how you could integrate pool-party motifs into a CRM for pool cleaners.

All of which would set your brand apart from the get-go and take you from being one of many to being the one and only.

B2B SaaS doesn’t have to be boring and you can create an... See more

There are a few dimensions of PMF that are in tension with each other, requiring deliberate tradeoffs at each level . There isn’t just one element to emphasize above all else. And importantly, there are different times in a company’s lifespan where founders need to intentionally prioritize one over another.

First-principles thinking, or thinking from first principles, sounds a lot more complicated than it is. It’s simply a technique for approaching problems with a beginner’s mind. Instead of working within assumptions and what people around you “know” to be true, you do the hard work of figuring out what’s actually true and, thus, what’s truly... See more

Raising money is never an accomplishment in and of itself —it just raises the stakes for all the hard work you would have had to do anyway: actually building your business.

Some signs of cultural corrosion caused by raising too much money:

• Hiring too many people—slows everything down and makes it much harder for you to react and change. You are

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